"Those who wish to live in imagination through the daily round of the unorganised worker and the casual labourer, to share its racking anxieties, its bitter humiliations, its joyless excitements, should turn from statistics and sociological generalisations to the poignant self-revelation of one of their own members. The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists, by Robert Tressall, house-painter and sign-writer, is not only a precise and careful record, written with a realism and a firmness of touch that are almost French, of a certain section of working-class life, but it also enables the thinking reader to form some conception of the immense revolution which the war must have caused in thousands of working class minds and households."
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Unsigned article reprinted in Alfred Eckhard Zimmern, Nationality & Government with Other War-Time Essays (1919)
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Robert Tressell
Robert Phillipe Noonan (17 April 1870 – 3 February 1911), born Robert Croker, and best known by the pen name Robert Tressell, was an Irish writer best known for his novel The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists.
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